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05.10.2016

Delay aging with a diet rich in fish oil, curcumin, magnesium and other natural anti-inflammatories

The more anti-inflammatory nutrients - such as omega-3 fatty acids, curcumin, garlic, ginger and magnesium - you consume, the less fast you'll age. Spanish nutritionists discovered this after doing a study that suggests that a diet with a low dietary inflammatory index delays the shortening of telomere length.

Study
The researchers measured the length of the telomeres in the blood cells of 520 Spaniards aged 55-88. Telomeres are in your DNA and function like a kind of molecular clock. The longer they are, the healthier you are and the longer you probably still have to live. The faster your telomeres shorten, the faster your aging process goes.

The participants in the study all had in common that they had a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. They had high blood pressure or high levels of triglycerides or bad cholesterol in their blood, or they were diabetics.

Dietary inflammatory index
The researchers calculated the dietary inflammatory index of the subjects' diet. The more anti-inflammatory nutrients such as vitamin C and E, omega-3 fatty acids, curcumin, polyphenols and zinc you consume in your diet, the lower your score. And the lower your score the fewer inflammatory factors such as CRP, IL-6 and TNF-alpha your body produces and the healthier you are.

The table below gives you an idea of which factors determine a person's dietary inflammatory index. Where there's a minus sign the component is one that lowers the index.

You can read more about the dietary inflammatory index here.

Results
The chance that the participants had relatively shorter telomeres than you'd expect for their age, weight, sex, exercise and health was bigger the more their diet was likely to induce inflammation. The figure below shows this.

The researchers divided the participants into three equal-sized groups based on their dietary inflammatory index scores. Left: diet with a low inflammatory score; right: diet with a high inflammatory score.

After five years the researchers got in touch with participants again. They measured whether their dietary inflammatory index had gone up, and divided the participants again into three equal-sized groups, based on these scores.

They then determined the chance of their telomere length having decreased for all three groups. Again they corrected their data for the influence of age, weight, sex, physical exercise and health.

The figure above shows that a worsening of diet speeded up the shortening of the telomere length considerably.

Conclusion
"Dietary inflammatory index scores were inversely associated with leukocyte telomere length, which indicates that anti-inflammatory values of the dietary inflammatory index were related to longer telomeres in adults at high risk of cardiovascular disease", the Spaniards summarised.

"These findings are consistent with [...] a beneficial effect of adherence to an antiinflammatory diet on aging and health by preventing telomere shortening."

Source:
Am J Clin Nutr 2015;102:897-904.

More:
Low-inflammatory-index diet protects against cancer 07.06.2016

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